Wrinkling is a local buckling phenomenon in sandwich structures subjected to compression and shear loading that is challenging for the aircraft design engineer. Numerous wrinkling models are proposed in the literature but historical formulas developed after the Second World War are still widely used by the industry with important knock down factors. Theoryexperiment correlation should be the final step in validating and evaluating the models. This article presents an experimental-computational dialogue on structural tests on large sandwich panels of dimensions 558 x 536 mm 2 representative of the design used in light aviation. The panels were subjected to compressive and shear loading by using the VERTEX test bench and wrinkling failures were observed. Comparisons are first made with linear